


that bad luck will follow you til you die, y'know?

by faedemon



Series: faedemon's Ectober Week 2020 [4]
Category: Danny Phantom
Genre: Backstory, Character Death, Ectober (Danny Phantom), Ectober Week 2020 (Danny Phantom), F/M, Gen, Minor Canonical Character(s), Revenge, Worldbuilding, Young Adults Make Bad Decisions And Reap The Consequences
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-28
Updated: 2020-10-28
Packaged: 2021-03-08 21:54:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,270
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27253762
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/faedemon/pseuds/faedemon
Summary: It’s a peculiar thing, what death makes. A ghost’s formation is a spinning wheel of attributes, and no one truly knows how many wedges there are, or where the peg will start or land, or the probability of any of it. Death is insidious—sometimes it will let you keep your identity. Sometimes it will let you keep your memory.Sometimes.
Relationships: Johnny 13/Kitty (Danny Phantom)
Series: faedemon's Ectober Week 2020 [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1985162
Comments: 13
Kudos: 21
Collections: my best fics





	that bad luck will follow you til you die, y'know?

**Author's Note:**

> This fic was written for Ectober Week 2020 Day 4: **Darkness** /Poison and can be found crossposted on FFN [here](https://www.fanfiction.net/s/13731209/1/that-bad-luck-will-follow-you-til-you-die-y-know) and on Tumblr [here](https://moipale.tumblr.com/post/633262876875014144/that-bad-luck-will-follow-you-til-you-die-yknow).

It’s a peculiar thing, what death makes. A ghost’s formation is a spinning wheel of attributes, and no one truly knows how many wedges there are, or where the peg will start or land, or the probability of any of it. Death is insidious—sometimes it will let you keep your identity. Sometimes it will let you keep your memory.

Sometimes.

Johnny 13 and Kitty are relatively well-known in their part of the Zone; they go around wreaking enough havoc to be as close to household names as the Ghost Zone can have, apart from Ancients like Clockwork. They’re known as a pair: that irritating, unhealthy couple that unceasingly chase after each other. Neither of them had been particularly faithful in life, always seeking out other people with which to make each other jealous. Johnny had never had good enough friends to tell him to stop. Kitty had never had good enough friends to tell her to walk away.

But what’s less well-known—even to Johnny and Kitty themselves, for death relieved them of their memories when they spun the wheel—is that, when Johnny 13 and Kitty died, they did not die alone.

They do not remember their name. Death took from Shadow their identity, and with it, a fair chunk of their memories. Shadow remembers this: they rode a dirt bike. They liked riding, and always wanted to graduate to a motorcycle, to be road-worthy. They never got the chance.

Johnny 13 and Kitty do not remember their deaths, but Shadow does. They always have.

The reaper came for Shadow in November, on a clear day with little wind and few people out. Perfect for riding. They had taken their bike to a track not far out of town, an unofficial one that had been carved out of the land, the Arizona desert, by other bikers that had come before them. They had enjoyed a few hours of reckless abandon, had fallen more than once. Shadow never minded falling; with the helmet and the knee and elbow pads they wore, it never really hurt.

When they were done, and Shadow was heading home for the night—it was evening now, quickly darkening—they took a glance at the road. Shadow usually just followed a walking path out of town to reach this place, but the main road leading to and from home was mere yards away, and it had always tempted them. They wanted to relish the feeling of real pavement under their tires. They wanted to be able to go _fast_ , in a way that the gritty dirt never let them.

 _What’s the harm,_ Shadow thought absently. Stupidly. _Just this once._

It was a clear night, you know, with little wind and few people out. Nobody was driving. There were no headlights for miles.

Shadow turned their bike onto the pavement and, just for kicks, gunned it straight down the center, right over the dotted line. Their bike did not have a headlight; it wasn’t road legal, after all.

The roar of the dirt bike on the pavement was loud, and so was the wind whipping by Shadow’s ears, and the helmet they wore muffled their hearing, and it had grown completely dark, and it was the Arizona desert and there were no streetlights, and there were no headlights, and—

Shadow died on impact. Johnny and Kitty had been taking a joyride outside of town, and more than a few miles back, Johnny turned off his headlight to scare Kitty. She had shrieked at first, dug her face into his back, but after she noticed how bright the stars were, she let him keep it off. Nobody was out, after all. There were no headlights for miles.

Kitty and Johnny lived. Kitty was badly banged up and broke her wrist and Johnny broke two ribs and got a concussion, but they lived. After collecting themselves, they walked up to Shadow’s body, where it lay, and Johnny cursed—something along the lines of _I can’t get caught for something again, this’ll be the last straw,_ and Kitty blabbered, panicked _—dead, oh god, Johnny, you killed—_ and Shadow was dead, yes.

Shadow was dead.

They reformed as a ghost there on the road, only a few hours later. There’s always been something a little off about the Arizona desert, and in death, Shadow will figure out why (the line between the Zone and the desert is thin).

By then, Kitty and Johnny had begun stumbling back home, Johnny having dragged his totaled motorcycle into the prickly roadside bushes, in the hopes no one would find it and recognize who caused the crash. They were a good half-hour out of town by car, though, and both of them were hurt. It did not take long for Shadow, a wisp of a thing, hardly there, to catch up with them, and, for the next few days, stay with them.

Shadow figured out fairly quickly how to make use of their new form. Their poltergeist powers, they affectionately dubbed the abilities, as they tickled wires and made lamps flicker. They graduated quickly from minor nuisances to genuine threats, like making bookshelves fall and cranes snap. Shadow relished in it, those first two days: the power, the mischief. No one had gotten seriously hurt by their hand.

And then the third day.

Johnny had bribed a local mechanic to take him and Kitty out into the desert to retrieve his bike and fix it up. By some miracle—or incompetence, or indifference, and the prospect of the latter still makes Shadow’s ectoplasm boil—the police hadn’t found it, and Johnny was able to pick it up with no problem. It wasn’t even that badly damaged: just scraped up, with maybe a few parts loose. Shadow’s dirt bike had never stood a chance.

Johnny had it fixed that very day. He took Kitty out on it that very night, like he hadn’t just killed a person three days ago. Like it hadn’t mattered at all.

Shadow would like to be able to say that it was purely an accident. That the two twenty-year-olds who had killed them were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, and that the minivan that T-boned them—as much as a full-size vehicle can T-bone a comparatively tiny motorcycle—did so by some other means than manipulation. That the driver was drunk, or tired, or something else plausible.

Really, they would like to be able to say that. For all that Shadow _hated_ them, hated the people who had ended their life, they didn’t want to kill them.

But Shadow was young, and a young ghost doesn’t tend to _think_. They tickled the minivan driver’s nerves, steering her in just the right direction, pressing the gas down just enough to speed through that red light—

Johnny and Kitty died on impact.

(and neither of them remembered much from their lives, but they remembered they loved each other, and hated each other, just a bit. and johnny remembered he loved to ride and kitty remembered her charisma, and so when shadow slotted themself into their afterlife, emerging from johnny’s silhouette like they had always been there, neither of them questioned it too much.

shadow remembered enough from life to know regret. shadow remembered enough to know repentance, and this is why they come when johnny whistles, and go where johnny points.

and johnny earned the 13 in his name for the shadow that followed him. _13 years’ bad luck,_ were the whispers, _if you crossed the man on the motorcycle. if you saw the eyes in his shadow._ )

**Author's Note:**

> hiya!!!!! hope you guys like todays fic. i am pretty proud of it! i love thinkin about minor characters so <3 <3 if you liked this please leave a comment; they mean a lot to me!
> 
> if you want to chat, you can find me on tumblr at my main blog [faedemon](https://faedemon.tumblr.com/) or my sideblog [moipale](https://moipale.tumblr.com/)!!


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